This article attempts to show, first, that for Hegel the role of property is to enable persons both to objectify their freedom and to properly express their recognition of each other as free, and second, that the Marx of 1844 uses fundamentally similar ideas in his exposition of communist society. For him the role of ‘true property’ is to enable individuals both to objectify their essential human powers and their individuality, and to express their recognition of each other as fellow (...) human beings with needs, or their ‘human recognition’. Marx further uses these ideas to condemn the society of private property and market exchange as characterised by ‘estranged’ forms of property and recognition. He therefore uses a structure of ideas which Hegel had used to justify the institutions of private property and market exchange, in order to condemn those same institutions. (shrink)

This article presents a new interpretation of the concept of social relations of production in Marx. Against G.A. Cohen, it argues that social relations of production are relations of interaction between persons, not relations of de facto control between persons and means of production. It argues further that these relations are relations of 'de facto recognition', that is, relations constituted by actions in which individuals treat each other as if they recognised each other in certain ways, whether or not the (...) relevant recognitional attitudes are present. (shrink)

This article presents an interpretation of Marx's idea of humans as species-beings. It argues that a group of individual beings count for Marx as species-beings if they consciously produce for others of their own kind.

This article argues that Hegel's political philosophy is grounded in the idea of mutual recognition, and the associated notion of the subject, which he derived from Fichte and elaborated in the Phenomenology of Spirit and Philosophy of Mind.